I’ve been against the auto bailout from the very beginning because it was a corrupt payoff to lazy corporate fat-cats and an ossified union. And when folks on the left say the bailout is a success, I explain that any industry can be propped up with a sufficiently…
Dan Mitchell
Daniel J. Mitchell is the President of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity and the Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation. Dr. Mitchell advocates limited government and fundamental tax reform, and is the nation’s leading opponent of tax harmonization schemes developed by the Brussels-based European Union, the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and the United Nations.
In addition to fiscal policy, Dr. Mitchell is a trenchant observer of economic developments and an expert on Social Security reform – particularly the fiscal policy impact of reform and what the US can learn from other nations that have created personal retirement accounts.
Social Security’s $30 Trillion Fiscal Time Bomb
I don’t give the issue much attention on this blog, but I’m very interested in Social Security reform. I wrote my dissertation on Australia’s very successful system of personal retirement accounts, for instance, and I narrated this video on Social Security reform in…
New Video Is a Strong Indictment of Obama’s Dismal Record on Spending
The burden of federal spending in the United States was down to 18.2 percent of gross domestic product when Bill Clinton left office. But this progress didn’t last long. Thanks to George Bush’s reckless spending policies, the federal budget grew about twice as fast as…
Just as Happened in Europe, the VAT Is Becoming a Money Machine for Big Govenrment in Japan
For years, I’ve been warning that a value-added tax (VAT) would be a terrible idea. Simply stated, politicians would have no reason to control spending or reform entitlements if they had a new source of tax revenue. In this video, I explain why this European-style…
A Primer on the Flat Tax and Fundamental Tax Reform
In previous posts, I put together tutorials on the Laffer Curve, tax competition, and the economics of government spending. Today, we’re going to look at the issue of tax reform. The focus will be the flat tax, but this analysis applies equally to national sales tax…
More Leftists Let Their Masks Slip, Admit They Want Big Tax Hikes on the Middle Class
While I disagree with statists, I sometimes admire their discipline. They are very good at staying “on message.” I am 100 percent confident, for instance, that they intend big tax hikes on the middle class, even though they would piously swear an oath to the contrary….
Since Leftists Don’t Like Corporate Loopholes, They Should Support the Flat Tax
I appeared on CNBC a couple of days ago to discuss a new report which claims that some big U.S. companies “only” paid 9 percent of their income to the government. While I’m a bit skeptical of the numbers (did it include the taxes paid to foreign governments, for…
The Deadly Impact of President Obama’s Economic Policies: 59,757 Needless Deaths…and Counting
In what will almost surely be the nastiest campaign ad of the political season, a pro-Obama super PAC basically accuses Mitt Romney and Bain Capital of causing a woman’s death. Viewers are supposed to hold Romney responsible because the woman’s husband lost his job,…
A Sequester Doesn’t Mean the Sky Is Falling…Not Even for the Defense Budget
I like sequestration. Automatic budget cuts might not be the best way of reducing the burden of government spending, but a sequester is better than leaving the federal budget on autopilot. Particularly since the “cuts” are mostly just reductions in already-scheduled…
Using the White House’s Own Benchmark, I Give Obamanomics an F on CNBC
I almost feel sorry for the ideologues and partisan hacks who feel obliged to defends Obama’s miserable economic performance. Keynesian spending policies and class-warfare tax policies have produced dismal economic performance, with unemployment stuck above 8 percent…